'Playing Singlet' and SKills
Richard already wrote about this in his recent article 'Playing Singlet is Bad For Your Health', but I wanted to expand on it.Presenting as non-plural usually means that people expect you to have a consistent set of skills that you can access at all times. This means that people, when dealing with us as a pseudosinglet, expect us to have my graphic design and cooking skills, Hess's sociability, Richard's patience and scientific knowledge, Sean's boldness, MD's creativity, Carmen's social conscience, Noel's artistic sensitivity AND Darwin's computer skills. Non-plurals can have all those skills together, though, but our strengths and weaknesses are often contradictory. M.D. comes across as aloof, which is a disadvantage when doing work that is primarily social in nature, and Hess tends to miss social cues that I catch, but he's better at seeming friendly than either MD or I am. MD, Hess and I can cook fairly well, but Richard can't. All those changes would be perfectly understandable to people who knew that we were separate people, but when people don't know, it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. How can '[singlet name] not know how to do it? He just did it yesterday!'
This can be particularly detrimental in a work setting, when your job is largely dependent on one system member's skills, and that system member is not available for whatever reason (fronting difficulties; emotional distress on that system member's part; a needed front holiday). Recently, Hess and I had to take a temporary hiatus from regular frontrunning, and a few people (MD; Noel; Sean) had to fill in our work duties. They did well, but our supervisors still seemed to miss us, and the way we had done things, although they didn't explicitly know we were plural. Although M.D. has enough practical skills via training to fill in for me with writing and graphic design, there is a certain social style that they seem to want from us, and M.D. can't do that, because that's not who he is. He's not socially awkward, but he's formal and a bit aloof, and when we're supposed to come across as warm and eager to teach something, it doesn't really 'work' with him. The same goes for Noel; although he did the research and art portions of our position very well, he wasn't as good as being 'socially engaging' in the way they expected. Noel is warm and friendly, but he speaks in a way that make him seem excessively formal. Conversely, M.D. is less affected by some of the autism-related self-care issues that Hess and I get, so he looked more outwardly presentable than the two of us did.
In a society that was friendlier towards plurality, these skills differences could be accommodated more easily, even if a job was shared. For example, there would be more allowances for someone not being able to front, and having someone else cover for them. Instead of having people think that there had just been a decline in 'singlet-person's' performance, we could have just said 'M.D. and Noel have different communication styles, and Kerry hasn't been able to front because of emotional distress.'